1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of disambiguation systems and more particularly to a method and system that simplifies and optimizes the grammar generation process in an interactive, grammar-based application.
2. Description of the Related Art
During the configuration of an interactive, grammar-based application, for example, an interactive voice response (IVR) system, the grammar generation process is typically the most tedious and time consuming portion of the configuration process. Currently, large and complex grammars for speech applications that are generated automatically (programmatically) are too simplistic, and domain specific. The difficulties encountered are tied to time-consuming generation processes (for example, a grammar generation for 300,000 names can take up more or less 24 hours, depending on hardware), the repetitive and time-consuming tuning through empirical qualitative and quantitative measurements when dealing with massive databases, and decisions on set segmentation for recognition optimization, homonyms, synonyms, etc.
One of the difficulties encountered in the grammar generation process is the ambiguities that arise due to homophones, which are words that are pronounced the same (and may or may not be spelt the same), but differ in meaning, such as the words “waste” and “waist”. In an interactive voice response (IVR) system, the presence of homophones can create difficulties during the grammar generation process. For example, in a voice-dialer application, when two or more people have identical sounding but differently spelled names, a caller asking for one person, might be connected to another due to the presence of a homophone.
A disambiguation system is needed to identify homophones and to create grammars that recognize the presence of homophones in order to resolve the ambiguities that they cause. The interactive application developer would benefit if he or she could be presented with a grammar view during the configuration step of the application. This view would provide valuable information to the developer, and would help to eliminate some of the time consuming iterative steps often present in the configuration of interactive applications.
However, recognizing the existence of homophones and incorporating a disambiguation system into the voice application addresses only part of the problem. One of the other problems related to grammar generation is the logistical complexity of taking data from an input source and generating a set of questions based on that data that can be presented to a user such that a single unique record or set of records is identified. The process of gathering data from a number of independent sources, normalizing the data, splitting and/or joining data fields, removing bad records, identifying homophones, etc. and then converting the data into grammar fields, has not been addressed in the prior art.
There is currently no interactive application configuration system or method that allows the application developer to retrieve data records from any input source, that develops complex grammars via use of a disambiguation system, and that provides an interactive user application resulting in the selection of the appropriate grammars based upon user responses to system prompts.